On “On History and Flattery”

To the Editor:

I appreciated AHA president Suzanne Marchand’s oh-so-timely inaugural column, “On History and Flattery” (January 2026), in which she reminds us—through a lively analysis of several historians drawn from the Western canon—that the historian’s task is not to flatter rulers, nations, or public opinion but to present the truth regardless of whether it offends one’s contemporaries. As the Trump administration removes historical plaques in Philadelphia that noted that the first US president was an enslaver (to give just one example of today’s war on history), it is inspiring to read that some of our predecessors centuries ago stood up against similar pressures to whitewash the realities of their societies. (Our colleagues in science, public health, and other disciplines, of course, are facing the same challenges.)

Please take what follows in the spirit of Marchand’s approving paraphrase of Lucian, that historians should welcome “educated ‘faultfinders’ who would catch the historian in errors or exaggerations.” Marchand’s repeated invocation of “the ancients,” “antiquity,” and “the ancient world” to signify only a portion of the eastern Mediterranean (and “early modern thinking” to encompass only European scholars) only highlights the fact that she failed here to incorporate her own observation about “the expansion and diversification of the discipline” to, among others, “non-Europeans.”

Having taught the introductory world history course for over 20 years, I recoil at the phrase “the ancient world” as a stand-in for Greece and Rome not simply because of political correctness but because of historical precision, including in this very example about historians themselves. Most world history textbooks discuss first-century BCE Chinese court historian Sima Qian, who endured castration because he challenged his emperor’s account of events. For example, Traditions and Encounters (5th ed., 2011) uses the subheading “Speaking Truth to Power in Han China” in their seven-paragraph examination of this scholar. And Worlds Together, Worlds Apart (vol. 1, 5th ed., 2018) includes a half-page excerpt from Sima Qian’s work criticizing multiple emperors, with the textbook authors adding that he “later had as much influence in East Asia as Herodotus . . . had in Greece and Rome.” It’s a line tailor-made for Marchand’s column—and ironic, given that she co-authored other editions of this very textbook.

Later, Ibn Khaldun, termed “the great Arab historian” by Worlds Together, Worlds Apart, grappled with the same challenge as the early modern European historians Marchand discusses: dependence on government patronage while seeking an independent, even critical, scholarly stance.

Incorporating the experiences of such non-Western scholars would have made Marchand’s column more historically inclusive and provided more than rhetorical recognition of the broadened scope of our discipline.